Protect the Clan
by Radie
Summary: An outcast Berne reflects on his unconventional friendship with a peculiar khajiit. One-shot, sketch for something bigger.


The Quarra are horrible creatures, really. They're violent and simple-minded, incapable of much thought beyond murder and food. Their leader is a handsome woman, certainly, but she is also so mad with bloodlust that her own spawn refuse to speak to her. Even House Telvanni had a bone to pick with them, and I should know: I was the Berne they decided was skilled enough to contend with Volrina Quarra, no doubt because I was the only Dunmer vampire they could find in a land rife with undead outlanders.

It was that job that found me kidnapped, spirited away by Volrina's accidents in the dead of night. I had never been to Khuul and never had the desire to see that drab fishing hole, but was tossed into the Alen tomb with promises that I'd only live long enough to tell those petty outcasts what I knew. The fact I knew nothing beyond the name of the mer who hired me ensured that my stay with the beasts would be a short one.

Fortunately, that was also the night I met her.

She was a beastly thing: a massively built, muscular khajiit with speckled fur and eyes like glass, her voice deep and booming like Red Mountain itself. Though her weapon was small, she cut through my captors like a reaver, howling in anger and bathing in their blood. I watched as, one after another, the Quarra threw themselves upon her. Despite their superior strength, every one fell.

Then, she turned the blade on me.

I stared at her, she stared back. She seethed, I held my breath. She demanded I come at her and I promptly asked her with _what_. The Quarra had stripped me of everything but the rings in my ears and the armor below my waist, and the only reason they hadn't taken the latter was because of how modest the lizard had been.

She lowered her weapon and I lowered my hands. She leaned in close, as though I were some sort of curiosity in a museum. With an interested tone and a cocked, furry brow, she had asked who I was and never took her eyes off of my mouth.

"Dravyn Telvayn. Berne Clan."

"Jai Swift-Fly," she answered a sweetly venomous voice. "Morag Tong."

To this day, I do not know what compelled me to follow her. Perhaps the fear of the Quarra coming after me again, though I'm loathe to admit I fear anything. Maybe it was the fact I found her interesting, an oddity considering the fact I had always felt the cats were good only for picking saltsrice and scrubbing floors. She always maintained that it was because she challenged me in some way and I'm a stubborn fool who couldn't walk away out of pride.

Whatever the case, I followed in secret, although I didn't last long in anonymity. Before long, she was leaving me gifts of raw meat before she'd retire, propping doors for me in her wake, and jokingly calling good-night into the shadows. When I finally misstepped and she saw me face-to-face, there was no fear in her eyes rather than a calm, knowing look. She simply pretended I had been with her the whole time and we continued as though nothing awkward had ever happened.

Hooded and disguised, I stayed at her side for years. I learned she had not lied when she told me she was Morag Tong. She taught me hand signals to communicate, explaining how she had lost her hearing some odd years ago to a grievous wound that had nearly killed her. I adapted to her leaning close and watching my mouth, and to the occasional slurring in her voice that oftentimes made her accent difficult to understand.

She told me of growing up in the deserts of Elsweyr, leaving when she realized that she had violent impulses that didn't fit in anywhere in her homeland. She confessed she worshiped Mephala quite fervently, claiming the daedra gave her confidence she lacked when she first stumbled onto the shores of Morrowind. It would seem not many Cathay left the deserts of her home, and the fact she was so unique and awkward made her an easy target for the native Dunmer.

Though, Jai laughed and laughed as she told me how she killed an entire cornerclub of their lot. Camonna Tong thugs, she said, who had rubbed a legionnaire the wrong way. It was her first and last grey writ, willingly carried out without Mephala's blessing since it made her feel as warm as magefire on the inside.

"It'll teach them to deny me a room," she had snorted.

And I told her of myself, of how I had once been a highwayman outside of Ald'ruhn, hiding in my family's tomb before being chased out by a pair of blasted outlanders. I explained how I had fallen in with House Telvanni, knowing my father had been a layman and hoping the wizards would remember enough about him to toss some work my way. I had found myself their mercenary, an enforcer who was later appointed bodyguard to a peculiar experiment they refused to explain.

It was only after three weeks of knowing their "project" that I found myself waking from a horrible dream, bloody and delirious, in an alley behind Dirty Muriel's in Sadrith Mora. Only then had I known what I had walked into, and I pursued my maker straight into the halls of Galom Daeus in Molag Amur. She had listened as I told her of Raxle Berne, the most cunning of vampire masters, and how he had rejected me. How I fell in with House Telvanni once more.

How I ended up where she found me.

No matter how bloody or vicious my stories grew, or how grotesque and inhuman my confessions became, Jai never once batted an eye. She told me worse, in fact, but with a cheerful tone as she bought rounds of mazte for everyone at the local bars. We worked on the same level despite having vastly different personalities, and the more I watched and listened, the more I grew to admire her.

What began as curiosity turned into the first friendship I had ever known, camaraderie that I had never known I lacked. I trusted her more than I trusted anyone, and there was comfort and relief in knowing at least one person who did not view me as an accident or a tool. We were a team, we pledged our lives for the other, and it was liberating in a way I couldn't describe. I wasn't alone.

Reservations were forgotten. I followed her into undead-infested forts with people we had never met, marveling at how she kept them in line. I engaged twisted creatures from Red Mountain, never once fearing for my life since she was at my side. I accompanied her as far as Necrom to aid her in fulfilling writs, and fancied a dive into Divayth Fyr's Corprusarium to play his twisted game of keys and chests.

When she had her children, I was surprised she opted to keep me around. Most would not, considering that I am a carnivore of the highest order and children are weak targets. Her trust in me didn't waver; the kittens knew no father, she had work to do, and I was the only one who she had complete faith could help with the runts. It seems funny to me now that, at the time, I had been repulsed by the notion of playing "uncle" to a bunch of warm-blooded beasts..

One was Dagi, the other Suthay-raht. I was Berne, Dunmer, and unsure how to handle either of them. Jai would leave to fulfill small writs without me, and I would chase the brats from one end of Nirn to the other, screeching profanity as they giggled and taunted me. The urge to kill them died over time, though my shaking nerves did not. My only comfort was knowing that, at the end of the day, Jai would always return. Always.

Yet, in time it grew apparent. I was a creature of the night, immortal. Jai was not.

I tried to make peace with it early on, but as I watched her grow slower and grayer, reality sank its claws in a bit deeper. It was shortly after she botched a writ that she was encouraged to retire at the ripe "old" age of forty. Larger races of khajiit do not live quite as long as the smaller, she explained, and she had been earnestly surprised to have lasted as long as she had. Still, I feared that my presence had somehow poisoned her, that whatever dark power sustained me had infected and drained her.

I could only watch as she grew feebler, weaker. She spent every moment she could with those runts and suddenly I found myself missing their attentions as well. I followed her closely, scared that if the wind blew the wrong way that it could very well kill her. It didn't take long before it was necessary to follow her; she needed help walking and, by the end, I carried her from room to room in the old, ramshackle cottage she purchased in Pelagiad.

She was fifty-three.

Thirty years to the day that I met her, she lay on her deathbed, chest shuddering as she breathed and the light in her eyes flickering. She refused the fort healers and visiting apothecaries, citing that she knew when to leave well enough alone. Communicating became harder since her eyesight was failing and she couldn't read my lips or see my hands quite as clearly. I stood guard over her instead, in complete silence, staring at the threshold to her bedroom as though ready to pounce death itself when it came for her.

"Foolish," she had said with a soft, raspy laugh. "You are so foolish, but it was wonderful to have spent most of my life with you as my clan-brother."

I answered with silence.

"And my kits? They know only you. No father. Only you."

It was hard to even think of a way to respond to that. I remember staring at the floor, feeling a prickling behind my eyes that was strangely familiar, as though I had experienced it a lifetime ago. When I realized I was going to cry, sadness was replaced with anger and I released a long, furious breath.

"You'll miss me, I know," she offered with that knowing, biting grin. "I'd miss me, too."

"Always so humble," I finally answered, hands twisting in the air as I signed out the words.

She had laughed as best she could, and it physically hurt to see her struggle. I had known her when she was young, alive, and so powerful. My vigor had never faded, so why did she have to wither? I will admit that, at the time, I considered offering the gift of my blood. It would have been a cowardly, uncouth thing to do, but grief and panic welled within me. I resisted only because I knew what the answer would be, and that she would view it as an insult if I even brought the subject up.

I'd let her go with dignity, and I'd keep what was left of mine.

"We'll see one another again," she assured me. "You're good, but you're _nothing_ without me. You'll find another den of Quarra soon enough, and we'll share a pint or two in hell."

"Sounds fair."

Suddenly, the air grew colder and she inhaled deep. Death had set upon us. I had half expected her last words to be painted with arrogance or dripping with venom, one final playful insult before she was dragged into aetherius. Instead, she turned her eyes to the now-cracked door, her grown children visible in the flickering candle light.

"Protect the clan," she urged, grasping my hand with what strength she had left. With that, she was gone, the candlelight with it. The door fell closed and I stood there, paralyzed, with the cooling hand of my dear friend clenched in my fingers.

I will not lie. I cried. It was not my proudest moment, but it was the biggest blow I had ever received in my many years. The loss of my own life paled in comparison to this moment. I accepted my vampirism far more gracefully than I accepted her death.

_Protect the clan._

Those words haunted me. When I dried my tears and exited the room, both of her sons sat there with big, wet eyes and horrified faces. Khajiit, Jai had once said, were not typically as close as they were. As vicious as an assassin as she had been, she was very much the doting mother and they loved her as dearly as any sons could. As I expected, they seemed to shatter when I told them what they already knew.

She had left us for her second journey. We'd meet her again, eventually. I needed their help carrying her to the Telvayn Ancestral Tomb. I was her clan-brother, after all, and she was my family. It only made sense to inter her where she belonged.

Mostly, I told them she had left me in charge. I would protect the clan.

Her youngest son retired to the Mages Guild, but her eldest had her fire. I followed him until he met his end to my own kind, and returned to his brother after the birth of his daughter: an Alfiq, which I was unaccustomed to. I wound up carrying her around like a pampered cat, much to her chagrin, all the while guarding her sister's pawn shop in Hammerfell. Then, I drifted south as the next generation sought out their roots in the land of their great-grandmother's birth.

It has been one-hundred and fifty years. I find myself in Skyrim, so removed from Jai yet heading in the direction of where we started. The newest descendant, Shehva, speaks so highly of me and has always been fascinated by the stories of the distant grandmother who brought me into the fold. I see a lot of Jai in her, from the confidence and wit to her strength and finesse.

However, she talks crazy. She speaks of getting into Vvardenfell, the land where it began, and perhaps paying a visit to my family tomb. No matter how often I tell her that it's buried and lost, the island destroyed, and we would not survive, I have caught her standing high on the rocks by the Shrine of Azura and staring at the distant Red Mountain with wide, excited eyes and a huge, fanged grin. She is adamant, she says, that there has to be a way. Even if there isn't, it would be a story to tell.

By Mephala's eight legs, she _is_ you, Jai. Smaller and a bit less bloodthirsty, yes, but that gleam in her eyes and the inability to back down from a challenge? Clearly, such traits skip several generations.

We are doing well, though. I am certain you can see that. I take pride in my work, though I am sorry for those we have lost, and I hope they are well with you in whatever pocket of eternity you have claimed as your own. One day I shall see you, and I still miss you terribly in the meantime.

But fear not, Jai. I still heed your words. I will protect the clan, no matter what.


End file.
